Sunday, May 19, 2013

Fed Up

With more and more phony "accountability" standards which give administrators more reason to get rid of teachers they don't like, more teachers are getting out.

Which is the whole point of the "reforms." Then, when there are no real experienced teachers left except perhaps the cronies of somebody already employed by districts, just shut the schools down and turn them into online schools or just lower the standards so that any idiot off the street can read from a script and call the person a "teacher."

The standardized testing and lousy working conditions play a role:

Others insist that financial concerns are only the tip of the iceberg. Philip Kovacs, an associate professor of education at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, surveyed 600 local K-8 teachers to gage their morale. While half of his respondents said they wouldn’t encourage others to become teachers, “Maybe only ten of them talked about pay,” says Kovacs. In contrast, “most of the individuals who said not to head into the field felt very strongly about the negative impacts of high stakes testing.”

Kovacs points to research that shows that mastery, autonomy, and sense of purpose—all threatened by recent reforms—are also central to human motivation. “A lot of people come into my teacher ed program with these wide eyed dreams of being a change agent for kids. But that’s not what they’re going to do. They’re finding it’s much more of a grind.” As a result, he himself has taken to actively discouraging his students from teaching.

That's only part of the problem. The REAL problem is the quality of the principals who have absolute control over teachers, and they are getting worse, not better.